12.41pm:Another day, another initiative. As the millennium development goals summit winds down, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, will launch a global strategy for women's and children's health. The campaign aims to save the lives of 16 million mothers and children over the next five years and has as much as $40bn (£25.5bn) in commitments from world governments and private aid groups.

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is expected at an event in conjunction with the launch, along with the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, and the prime ministers of Ethiopia, Norway, and Tanzania. The ubiquitous Melinda Gates of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is also scheduled to speak.

In other events, Ban will chair a forum bringing together world leaders and captains of industry to see how the private sector can help in realising the MDGs. Elsewhere, there will be a discussion of how integrating Aids programmes into other health and development efforts can help progress towards reaching the MDGs.

And lots more speeches. Argentina, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazil and the US are up today. Speakers have been remarkably good in not overrunning, even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. You can follow their speeches on the UN live feed and get all their speeches on the UN website.

1.01pm:Oxfam has already expressed scepticism about how much money for the global strategy for women and children's health is truly new and raised the issue of accountability.

"That kind of money would go a long way toward reaching the child and maternal health goals, but we have a big concern," Oxfam spokeswoman Emma Seery told the Associated Press.

"Where will that money come from? Half of the donors cut their aid last year" amid the global economic crisis, she said. "We're just nervous that it will be governments bringing together a lot of previous commitments, and that won't mean much for poor people."

In the same vein, the World Development Movement, an aid campaign group, castigates rich countries for not living up to their pledges.

The WDM director, Deborah Doane, said: "With only five years to reach the millennium development goals, leaders of rich countries need to get beyond inspirational speeches, and pledging more aid money that never arrives. Heads of state are delivering rhetoric but little else. They need to address the root causes of poverty that simply aren't being mentioned: including an unfair trading system, unjust debt burdens and the biggest elephant in the room: climate change. If governments continue to dodge these thorny issues, then ultimately, the MDG project will be doomed to failure."

Yesterday, William Easterly, who is on the other end of the aid spectrum to WDM, made the same point about world trade - how it is a grossly unfair playing field for developing countries. He notes the egregioius example of how the US subsidises American cotton producers, which flood the world market, depressing export prices.

1.26pm:The Guardian has a photo gallery of some of the world leaders attending the summit, from Paul Kagame of Rwanda to Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. There's also one of Nick Clegg shaking hands with Ban Ki-moon.

As you await with bated breath for proceedings to get underway here's a game to while away the hours.

"Even as our economy suffered from illegal sanctions imposed on the country by our detractors, we continued to deploy and direct much of our resources toward the achievement of the targets we set for ourselves."

One veteran UN observer said of Mugabe's speech: "what chutzpah."

1.48pm:You can check to see who is making progress on MDG 4 (reduce by two thirds the under five mortality rate) on this Guardian interactive. It shows some dramatic dramatic improvement in different parts of the globe.

2.11pm:Nick Clegg, who makes his UN debut today, has been briefing reporters travelling with him, including the Guardian's Polly Curtis.

She says he acknowledged there would be difficulties justifying the ring-fencing on aid domestically. He confirmed there would be primary legislation to protect the budget, but that the parliamentary time to secure that legislation had not yet been confirmed.

Eamonn McCabe

"This is an immensely important moment in terms of restoring the credibility of the MDG process and of course a particular challenge for many of the donor countries to prove theircommitment at a time when they have their own financial difficulties," Clegg said. "We have a job to explain to people back home that this isn't only the right thing to do for moral reasons, to heal the grotesque divisions between wealth and poverty in the world, to tackle human suffering, to restore a greater sense of balance between one part of the world and another, but that it's also in our own financial and our enlightened self-interest. Twenty of the 24 countries that are furthest away from the MDGs are steeped in conflict. Conflict breeds radicalism, extremism, terrorism. This is not a commitment we made 10 years ago that can be lightly discarded when things get tough."

Asked whether meeting other world leaders and giving a speech would make a difference, he said: "I don't think speeches themselves change things. I'm new to this, I've never been to one of these summits before. I come with enthusiasm for the objectives of the summit but a fair amount of intuitive impatience that there's no point having a summit unless it makes a difference in communities where people actually live."

2.16pm:The Guardian has asked people to send Audioboo messages on their hopes for the summit. This reader wants world leaders to make sure that poor farmers have access to livestock.

2.48pm:UN radio has this story about Thandazile Nombele, a 15-year-old South African girl, who lives in Port St John, in Eastern Cape. She lived with her mother, aunt and three cousins. But with the death of her mother and her aunt, Nombele has become part of what is called a child-headed household. The story is part of UN Radio's project 15, in partnership with UN agencies, telling the stories of 15-year-old girls around the world.

Of the 1.8 billion people worldwide aged between 10 and 24, almost half are girls.

3.15pm:How did Ahmadinejad's bizarre speech yesterday go down in Iran? Saeed Kamali Dehghan, who writes about Iran for the Guardian, said there was plenty of irreverent reaction from Iranian bloggers.

3.25pm:Some sceptical reaction to Hillary Clinton's initiative on clean stoves, unveiled to much fanfare yesterday. Dr Opiyo Oloya in Uganda wonders whether the money will reach people like his mother so that she can buy one. Oloya writes on the New Vision website:

I am sure my mother would say, "Let them give me the money in my hand, and I will go buy the stove they are talking about." Unfortunately, as Prof Sachs lamented, the money may never materialise if developed nations keep their hands in their pockets. Even more sadly though, according to Transparency International, a big chunk of the money that is delivered often ends up lining the pockets of corrupt greedy officials.

So they will talk a good game in New York this morning about shooting for the MDG goals by 2015, but if she lives for another five years, I am sure my mother, like millions of other women in the developing countries, will still be cooking with an open-hearth fire. I am sure of that.

3.54pm:The speeches have started at an event on biodiversity. The European commission president, José Manuel Barroso, has just made a bleak statement about the loss of biodiversity.

"Our ability to end poverty and hunger, and improve child and maternal health depends on the long term availability of fresh water, food, medicine and raw materials that nature provides. It is also clear that we will not be able to mitigate climate change or adapt to its impacts, or prevent desertification and land degradation, if we don't protect our ecosystems and biodiversity. And yet, despite these interlinkdages, we've collectively failed to reach our 2010 biodiversity targets. Instead, we continue to lose biodiversity at an uprecedented rate."

Ban said a rescue package similar to that introduced after the global financial crisis is urgently needed to halt the worldwide loss of biodiversity.

"We are bankrupting our natural economy," he said. "Allowing [our natural infrastructure] to decline is like throwing money out of the window."

According to the UN, the world will not meet the 2010 target to slow the decline in biodiversity, one of the eight MDGs. It says nearly 17,000 plant and animal species are currently at risk of extinction, while the number of species under threat of disappearing is also growing by the day.

While the only MDG directly pertinent to gender has just one target - to promote gender equality and empower women (eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education) - there are myriad development issues relating to women and girls - quite often linking back to poverty and inequality. One of them is child marriage, a custom that still retains a grip in many parts of Africa and the Middle East. While it is important for us Africans to practice and uphold our respective customs, it is equally necessary to eliminate (or modernise) some of our traditions that violate the rights and dignities of women and girls. These nuances are completely absent from the MDGs.

4.15pm:Here is the story by the Guardian's Polly Curtis, based on Nick Clegg's briefing to reporters.

Eamonn McCabe

Clegg says: "We can't cut ourselves off from the rest of the world. If the rest of the world is susceptible to extremism, conflict, the volatile effects of runaway environmental degradation, it affects us. It affects us directly. It affects the safety of British families on British streets. It affects the people who come to live in the United Kingdom. It affects our shared environment.

5.12pm:We are well into the speeches in the morning session of the plenary meeting. Here's a flavour of the bitterness felt by some developing countries at the failure of rich countries to meet their aid pledges. This comes from Ralph Gonsalves, the prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines.

The most woefully unmet MDGs is goal eight titled "a global partnership for development". While developing countries continue their heroic struggle to advance in an increasingly difficult environment, many of our development partners have replaced their firm and measurable commitment of assistance with platitudes and empty rhetoric.

Gonsalves points out that developing countries received $120bn in 2009, well short of the $300bn pledged and that the Gleneagles commitment to Africa is $20bn short.

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5.41pm:This is the latest of the Amref (a health development NGO) videos on the MDGs we have been featuring on the live blog over the last two days. In this video on MDG 8 - "a global partnership for development" - the Kenyan teenagers go to Palermo, Italy, to ask the experts: "what is needed in Africa in order for it to develop?"

5.56pm:ActionAid has given a thumbs down on the summit, even though it welcomed the health initiative for women and children.

"The UK is doing well on development with our commitment to 0.7% in aid," said its head of policy, Meredith Alexander. "But overall this summit has not provided the big boost in resources and political leadership needed to meet the global hunger promise. With only five years left until the deadline, parents struggling to feed their families were looking to the UN meeting to deliver something extraordinary. Instead, the summit has only been business as usual and the world's poorest people are left wondering why."

6.06pm:Ban has officially launched the health initiative for women and children. The UN says it should to save the lives of more than 15 million children under five, prevent 33m unwanted pregnancies and prevent the death of 740,000 women from pregnancy and childbirth complications. Go to 2.32pm entry for a link to the plan.

Unicef, the UN population fund, the joint UN programme on HIV/Aids, WHO and the World Bank are involved in the project as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

6.31pm:Polly Curtis, who is accompanying Nick Clegg, says various groups have complained about the cost of the summit. They say the budget could have fed small countries for a year. Polly emails:

I've just been at a UN forum on the private sector where Nick Clegg, Bob Geldof, Graça Machel, Cherie Blair, Richard Branson and Geena Davies are debating how to get businesses involved in the MDG cause. The event shows the organisation's sometimes extraordinary lack of self-awareness. Waiters served wine with a chicken salad followed by chocolate torte on linen tablecloths. The sign on one table read "poverty and hunger". Ban Ki-moon told the audience of about 200 people: "Investment in the MDGs is an investment in growth and markets of the future."

Global development: Delegates at UN summit Photograph: Guardian

Here are the great and the good tucking into their torte

6.42pm:Reaction is coming in thick and fast on that health initiative.

Action for Global Health, a group of European development health NGOs, has given a guarded welcome to the plan.

"For the strategy to be truly effective, rich countries must not only live up to their financial commitments from New York but must also put systems in place that track and uphold progress on the ground," the group says. "They must also make good on the strategy's pledge (which they have backed) to cede control of national health plans to the governments of developing countries.

The group's global advocacy officer, Rebecka Rosenquist, adds: "The pledges look good on paper but accountability is the key issue here. Let's hope the international community puts the right tracking systems in place so that we can report real progress on child and maternal health at the next UN MDG meeting in 2013."

Nick Clegg, the deputy PM, however, is upbeat on the health plan. "Development starts with healthy mothers and children, without whom we will never build strong societies," he said. "Britain has for months been making the argument that the world must make a step change in its efforts on maternal health. Today the world showed that it had finally heard that message. This is an unprecedented commitment."

7.06pm:Amnesty International is not too thrilled by the summit either. The group says world leaders missed the chance to put human rights at the heart of the MDGs.

"With only five years to go, it is completely unacceptable that world leaders have still not agreed to take concrete action to address discrimination and other human rights violations, which prevent the MDGs from benefiting those who need them most," said Salil Shetty, Amnesty's secretary general. "Although the plan of action includes language recognising that 'the respect for and promotion and protection of human rights is an integral part of effective work towards achieving' the MDGs, there is no follow-through in terms of commitment to take any tangible action."

7.19pm:There seems to be some confusion as to which MDG is the most off target. Sarah Boseley, the Guardian's health editor, says that accepted wisdom at the summit is that it is MDG 5 - maternal health.

But the WaterAid NGO issued this press release: "United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon together with the president of Liberia Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf today called for immediate action on sanitation - the most off-track millennium development goal (MDG) target in sub-Saharan Africa."

Sarah emails: "Who is right? Well WaterAid is right - sanitation for all is not achievable at the present rate of progress for decades to come. But of course it is not a whole MDG in itself - and the water element of the target is doing quite well. Inevitably NGOs and, indeed, UN agencies, lobby for their own interests and areas of responsibility. It will be interesting to see how long the consensus that mothers must come first lasts."

More from Polly Curtis, who attended a UN side event on the private sector and MDGs.

Eamonn McCabe

The love-in between campaigners, politicians and the corporate world was temporarily broken by an impassioned intervention from Cherie Booth, who took business people to task. She told them to address inequalities in the boardroom as well as in the developing world. Welcoming the UN's new emphasis on women's health in the MDGs, she said: "The women who work in your organisations will give a hollow laugh if you say you're going to help women in the developing world and there are no women on your boards and if women aren't paid fairly or promoted fairly in your organisations... The private sector has to get this right in its own backyard."

7.41pm:Here is a Reuters story on the sanitation and water issue.

The lack of clean drinking water and sanitation in the world's poorest nations threatens UN goals to cut poverty and disease, and raises the risk of conflict, leaders and aid groups said on Wednesday. Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf said the millennium development goal on increasing access to sanitation services had become the "the orphan MDG"."The sector is under-discussed, under-prioritised and therefore under-resourced," Johnson-Sirleaf said at an event during the UN summit.She said 26 of 54 African countries were on track to meet the target to halve the number of people without safe drinking water by 2015, but that only six nations looked set to meet the sanitation goal. In Africa, sanitation is the MDG furthest from being met and globally there are 2.6 billion people living without clean toilets, the WaterAid charity said.The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said the water and sanitation millennium goal was vital to the success of other targets."(Inadequate water and sanitation) increases the likelihood of disease and death, it perpetuates poverty," he said. "Water is not only a necessity, it's a human right.

8.01pm:The morning session has ended so I will wrap up things now. Here's a summary of today's events.• The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, launched a $40bn global strategy to save the lives of 16 million women and children over the next five years• NGOs react negatively to the summit. ActionAid said it was an "expensive side-show that offered everything to everyone and nothing to no one." • Nick Clegg announces plans to increase UK spending on malaria from £150m to £500m a year by 2014.